Reflections, commentaries, critiques and ideas from 40 years experience in the fields of Community Development, Community Education and Social Justice. Useful tools and techniques that I have learnt also added occassionally.

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The name of this blog, Rainbow Juice, is intentional.The rainbow signifies unity from diversity. It is holistic. The arch suggests the idea of looking at the over-arching concepts: the big picture. To create a rainbow requires air, fire (the sun) and water (raindrops) and us to see it from the earth.Juice suggests an extract; hence rainbow juice is extracting the elements from the rainbow, translating them and making them accessible to us. Juice also refreshes us and here it symbolises our nutritional quest for understanding, compassion and enlightenment.

Tuesday, 12 July 2016

The Paradox of Personal Choice

One of the prevailing mantras of our time is that we all have choices, and
that if we make the right choices then our lives will evolve accordingly. As
with many things in life this is both right and wrong. It is true and untrue.
The reality lies somewhere in the murky haze between correct and incorrect.

We do have choices, and we are able to make them every moment of our lives.
Our choices are based on what we know at the time, what our past experience has
been and whether we are in a frame of mind to keep making the same choice as
previously or whether we wish to try something different. Some choices are
conscious, others less so. All our actions are based on choices, whether we
realise it or not.

However, the mantra of personal choice is a paradox. We have personal choice, but we do not have control over
our reality. The “I have choices, I create my reality” mantra has at least two
shortcomings. 1. It needs to acknowledge our inter-connection with others, and
2. It needs to understand that we cannot control outcomes. Both of
these shortcomings are connected.

Inter-connection
When we think that our choices can create our reality we ignore the fact that
every other being (human and otherwise) is also making choices. When we
encounter someone we may choose to encounter that person with cheerfulness and
the desire to enter into an harmonious discussion. But, he or she, may not be
in such a receptive mood and their choice may be to ignore you, or worse still,
punch you. I know that this is a pretty dismal example, but the extremity of it
is used to show the problem with believing that we create our reality entirely
through our own individual choices. In this case, you may walk away from the
encounter still with your cheerfulness intact. However, you may now also have a
bloody nose, and that is possibly not the reality you wished to create. But you
chose. So did the other person. And in the moment of contact between the two
of you reality was created.

As human beings we are intimately connected, none of us is completely
self-enclosed, self-determining, self-sufficient. The choices that each and
every one of us are making throughout our lives can be thought of as small
sources of energy. Collectively, those sources of energy go towards creating
the wondrous and emergent reality that is our world. None of us can take sole credit
for any part of it. Nor can we blame any one person for those aspects that we
don’t like or don’t want. The reality we live and breathe arises from the
continuous interplay of all our individual choices. We could call it the Dance
of Life.

Furthermore, we ignore the fact that non-sentient matter and energy is also
“making choices.” What do I mean by that? Think of something as simple as the
weather. Every day when we arise in the morning the weather has already
“decided” what it is going to do. It may have “decided” to rain, it may have
“decided” to be blustery. Maybe the “decision” is to be a beautiful, clear,
warm, sunny day. Whatever the weather is, that has already affected the
decisions we make. Do we put on warm clothing? Do we take an umbrella and
raincoat with us?

The Ego and Control
Our ego wants to be in control, or at least think that it is in control.
Freud likened the ego to “a man (sic) on horseback, who has to hold in check
the superior strength of the horse,” with the horse being the id.

Of course we need our ego in order to function as human beings, but we need
also to realise when the ego gets in the way of our understanding how things
work and how much control we really have. I create my reality is
often another way of saying I control my destiny. The difficulty comes
in the “I.” In many ways there is no inseparable, self-contained “I.” The “I”
is a self-referring construction of our own mind and ignores the
inter-connection between everything as discussed above.

The desire for control can arguably be viewed as the source of many of the
problems that we face both individually and collectively. We learn this
misguided lesson early in life. How many of us grew up within families where
there were very definite control mechanisms playing out. Father controlled the
finances. Mother controlled what was eaten. Teachers controlled what was
taught. Older siblings controlled what was being played. The clock on the wall
“controlled” what time we went to bed. These examples should not be read as
having inherent rights or wrongs – only that the concept of control is instilled
in us from a very early age.

We must transcend our desire for control.

Making Butterfly Choices
Does this mean that we resign ourselves to fatalism? Does it mean that our
personal choices are worthless? Not at all. All that this discussion is
attempting to suggest is that reality is co-created, and that each and every one
of us have an unique, even vital, role in that co-creation. We are all like
butterflies, flapping our wings over the Amazonian jungle. None of us can ever
know whether it is our flapping wings that set off the thunderstorm over
Tokyo.1
Chaos Theory tells us that massive outcomes can be set off by the smallest of
inputs. Our individual choice may be one of those small inputs. Equally, it
may not be. But let us not fall into the ego trap of believing that the
outcomes of our individual choices are not influenced by hundreds (possibly
thousands) of other people, other sentient beings, and our environment. We must
learn to live with the paradox.

Note:

1. This is a reference to the Butterfly Effect in Chaos Theory. The
Butterfly Effect says that a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the
world can set off a thunderstorm in another part of the world.

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About Me

I have almost 40 years experience working (paid and unpaid, government and non-government) in community development/education and social justice fields. I have continued to keep myself abreast of philosophies and theories in these and related fields. This blogsite will offer ideas, thoughts, reflections on these fields as well as giving some tools and techniques. I don't pretend that these will be original but I do hope that they will be able to translate some of these diverse ideas into coherent forms accessible to workers in the areas.